Structural Welding Analysis and/or Design Software

[aluminumb]

Have been using google searches to see what is available for welding analysis softwares etc. Have not have a lot of luck finding anything reasonably accommodating.
Are there any suggestions from the community on whether there are any good reliable programs available out there?
Mainly looking for analysis capabilities for the elastic vector and instantaneous center methods, along with a multitude of welding geometries to choose from, as well as, in plane and out of plane eccentricity options.

Any suggestions are welcomed.

Thanks,

Aluminumb

 

[JoshPlumSE]

I imagine there are a lot of ICR spreadsheets out there for various 2D geometries. Unfortunately, I can't name any programs that do this explicitly. I believe we found a couple of spreadsheets from some professor or grad student at one point. But, that was just used to validate that the answers we were getting were correct.

However, where ICR becomes really tricky (or poorly defined) is when you have a 3D geometry where the applied load is not in the same plane as the weld group. When I worked at RISA, one of our engineers took a 'deep dive' into this for the RISAConnection program. He came away frustrated and left the 3D situations to the elastic method. Really, we could have done it. It's just that it would have taken a lot of time. And, we would have been the only people doing it.

 

[JAE]

We simply wrote an internal spreadsheet that allows input of 2D weld geometry using straight lines.
You input the various forces on the weld group and it solves for weld stress based on the simpler elastic method - does not do instantaneous center.
Not to hard to write.

The problem with it is that it doesn't do curved welds - I suppose you could fake them in with lots of tangent lines though.

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[aluminumb]

Alright, thanks much for the feedback. Looks like limited analysis tools out there for a topic that is quite common and critical. Can be time consuming, as well as, monotonous to do hand weld calcs for certain cases, so was looking for some efficiency.

 

[MacGruber22]

[URL unfurl="true"]http://www.steeltools.org/viewdocument/weldgrp[/url]

-Mac